1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to business event processing and application integration, and more particularly to systems and methods for providing data event processing and application integration which exploit multiple, distributed sources.
2. Related Art
In today's technological climate, a business enterprise must often bring information together from multiple, distributed sources in order to accomplish certain tasks (e.g., information sharing and alerting, multi-source data processing, content management, etc.). Such distributed sources include Customer Resource Management (CRM) applications, various internal and external databases, various user application software, legacy systems and the like. Such users must normally access each system or source manually in a “one-by-one” fashion in order to achieve the desired tasks.
Finding the above-described situation unacceptably slow and painstaking, software developers are often challenged to write applications for such business enterprises in order to take advantage of these distributed resources.
Invariably, in such a technological climate, the software developers meet the above-described challenge by writing a custom piece of software to take advantage of the available distributed resources. The writing of such custom pieces of software can be labor intensive, have long development cycles and require significant low-level coding. Further, the resulting code often requires significant human operator review and handling of events that occur within or across the distributed systems or sources accessed by the code.
Therefore, given the above, what is needed is a system, method and computer program product for data event processing and application integration. The system, method and computer program product should enable applications to be assembled out of many existing systems in a short period of time, thus shortening information technology (IT) delivery cycles, improving customer satisfaction, and lowering operational costs.